


real gods require blood

by deckards



Series: real gods require blood [1]
Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:51:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7232638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>it’s not always easy to find the line between hero and villain, demigod and demon.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>stephen strange investigates a series of murders. he doesn’t like what he finds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

 

 

> but the worst kind of monster was the burrowing kind. the sort that crawled into you and made a home there. the sort you couldn’t name, the sort you couldn’t see. the monster that ate you alive from the inside out.
> 
> \---- emily carroll

 

The man lying face down in the pool was dead. His corpse bobbed in the chlorinated water and his hair was splayed out in dark tendrils and his shoelaces drifted from side to side. The pool belonged to a mansion in the Hollywood Hills with pale stucco walls and a red tile roof.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, this sounds like the opening to a Billy Wilder film. Be that as it may, it’s a true story and there’s one crucial difference between what happened here and _Sunset Boulevard_ : I’m not dead. Not yet, anyway.

This story begins several days ago, back in New York.

Part of my job is to investigate unusual occult activities. Most of those turn out to be nothing of note: charlatans and grifters out to make a few dollars, desperate souls who heard rumours once and thought they could summon Satan with the right incantations. Recently there’s been a string of vicious killings across the country; they have all the hallmarks of a psychopath trying to cover their tracks with the auspices of magic. Fake, almost certainly, and I might have ignored them for a while longer if Tony Stark hadn’t turned up at my doorstep and asked me to get involved.

In the films I watched growing up, this would make him the femme fatale, some gorgeous widow in a perfectly tailored black gown desperate for my help. I’m not sure Tony would appreciate that description, however, and he doesn’t fit the role, narratively or otherwise. Not in this story, anyway.

He was wearing a grey suit with black shoes and he was pacing my ante-room in a tight circle. The irritation was radiating off of him in waves.

I said, “Anthony, you’re giving me motion sickness. Please, take a seat.”

He stood still and squinted at me. Annoyed, I supposed, either at the use of his proper name or at being told to sit. Perhaps both. Not everyone appreciated being given direction by a man floating several feet off the floor.

I steepled my fingers and said, “Have some tea.”

He glanced over his shoulder at an armchair, then looked back at me and crossed his arms over his chest. “I didn’t come here for tea, Doc.”

An eyebrow drifted up my forehead. “Evidently.”

He threw his arms up into the air and said, “Look, I get that you think it’s bullshit, but would you please just look into it? For me? Maybe it’s nothing, but I’m sick of all this crap creeping up on us because we’re too busy with…whatever the hell we’re too busy with until the next crisis hits.”

“Very well.”

“Lately it feels like it’s one emergency after another and I can’t help but think if we could just get on top of it all somehow, if we could get some kind of head start, maybe we could minimize some of this damage and—”

He stopped talking and faced me. “You already agreed, didn’t you? I was giving you a whole speech over there for absolutely no reason whatsoever.”

I uncurled my legs and landed on the floor. “It was a very good speech. I was quite enjoying it.”

He frowned. “It does feel like we keep getting more and more behind, though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It does.”

He said, “Okay,” and walked out of the room.

I trailed after him, stopping at the foot of the stairs. He opened the front door and stepped onto the concrete stoop. He said, “Stephen? Thanks.”

I nodded and he left.

Behind me, Wong said, “Do you think Stark is right about this being more than just an average serial killer?”

“No, not particularly. If it is magic, I haven’t detected it.” I sighed. “Either way, it’s a problem. If it is magic and I haven’t felt it, we’re in trouble; and if it’s not, well, there are certainly worse ways to spend time than stopping a murderer.”

I ran my thumb across my chin. “You know, I think a drink might be in order.”

And that’s how this story begins. Obviously, I was wrong when I shrugged off the killings as routine—but we’ll get to that later.

My name is Stephen Strange, and I’ll be your narrator.


	2. stiffen the sinews

Hidden in the bowels of New York City is a dingy lounge that caters exclusively to sorcerers. It’s called The Bar with No Doors and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a bar with no doors—entrance requires the use of magic. I come here when I need to find other mystics who will still talk to me. Except in the event of a genuine emergency, that number is strikingly few. No one utters aloud what precisely it is about me that they find so distasteful, but I’ll admit to some eccentricities and miscalculations now and then. It may not sound that bad, but when you have a position like mine, a miscalculation can literally mean the end of the world. So I suppose I can understand a certain wariness.

And that’s without counting the current state of my love life. If I thought my former in-laws were difficult, it’s only because I hadn’t considered my own personal tendency toward complete and utter disaster. At a certain point it’s easy to think you know better. I used to think _I_ knew better. There was a time when I genuinely believed I was a fully functional adult human with a decent grasp on my role as Sorcerer Supreme. I may have slightly overestimated myself.

The story of my life has always been one long, protracted battle against overconfidence and complacency. Pride, if you’re feeling particularly inclined toward the language of sin. My path never seemed as precipitous when I had the scaffolding of my master’s teachings to bolster me, or the steadfast kindness of my wife—my _ex_ -wife—to....

Well, I’d probably be lost altogether if it weren’t for Wong. Have been, a more than once. But that’s a story for another time.

The proprietor of this establishment was a severed head named Chondu and when I arrived he was floating bottles across the bar. I nodded and made my way to a corner in the back. After Tony’s visit, I made a general call asking for anyone who knew about the slayings to meet me here. Wanda Maximoff seemed to be the only one who’d deigned to appear. She was seated with her back to the wall, sipping on something in a pineapple. It smelled tropical and she smelled like she always did, like an ocean breeze and electrical current. A coastal storm, wild and unpredictable and full of danger.

“No one else?” I asked, dropping into a chair next to her.

She smiled around her straw and said, “It’s good to see you, too, Stephen.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

She waved her hand at me: nevermind. I pressed my index fingers together and dragged them across the bridge of my nose. They slid against my furrowed brows, smoothing the skin in a useless self-comforting gesture.

Behind my hands I said, “I don’t suppose you have any ideas about this?”

“I might.” She reached toward my face, toward my hands, and I dropped them to my sides, hid them safely below the table and its decades of water stains and scratches.

I used to wear gloves; now I use a simple glamour, a spell so easy to maintain it works while I’m asleep or on the astral plane. It’s excessively vain, I know, but I can’t stand people looking at the scars that slice down my fingers and across my knuckles. My hands are a jagged jigsaw of pale lines and pitted skin pulled against bones and metal rods, a three-dimensional schematic of a ruined cityscape stretching from excess to apocalypse. And they ache constantly.

Facing Wanda, I raised an eyebrow and said, “Do tell, my dear.”

“After you sent that message about the murders, I plotted the locations.” She pulled out a road map of America, neatly folded into precise rectangles, and unfurled it across the table, slender hands smoothing out the creases. Crossing the country was a series of small red Xs. “It seems random at first, but if you look from a distance—”

“They form a circle of some kind,” I said. I should have noticed sooner. I traced my finger over the pattern, leaving a bright scarlet trail hovering above the map. It should have been impossible for this to happen without me sensing the shift in energies, unless...unless whatever the sacrifices were meant to accomplish hadn’t been completed and the arcane power they were gathering was yet to be unleashed.

I drew lines in the air connecting Xs to each across the circumference until a clear design revealed itself: it was a magic circle. Unfinished and rudimentary, but massive. Something this big could easily summon a powerful eldritch entity or open a dimensional portal. Or perhaps something altogether worse.

“May I?” I asked,  snatching the map and crumpling it into a mess that might have resembled folded sections to someone with a sufficiently high prescription and no corrective lenses. “Thank you, Wanda. You’ve been a great help.”

I stood and strode out of the bar.

Behind me, I heard her huff something that sounded like, “Oh, anytime, Doctor. What lovely bedside manners you have.”

\----

Even in the middle of January, Southern California was unbearably hot. Warmth rose in currents off the roads. Their darkened asphalt surfaces wound like rattlesnakes through the Hollywood Hills and above the curbs the air stagnated in dry plants and stiff grass; it smelled like dying flowers and burning rubber, coated my skin in a thin sheen of pollution. I had only been here five minutes, and already I was desperate to teleport back home and spend several days in the shower.

Out of habit, I’d transformed the appearance of my sorcerer’s garb into something more casual, a navy coat and black trousers with the Cloak of Levitation settled around my neck like an ermine collar. I could have cast a spell to keep myself cool, had considered it, even, but the house I was searching for was at the end of the block and there was no sense in wasting magical energy.

A further examination of the map had suggested several potential places where the next sacrifice would occur, but before I could narrow down the location, Wong heard about a murder in LA that sounded similar enough to bear investigation. According to the police report, it had happened about half an hour ago, and seemed to have been interrupted. I didn’t have much hope that the killer would still be hanging around, but there was still plenty of information to be found at a crime scene.

I trudged the rest of the way up the hill, hands shoved in my pockets and shoes clacking loudly on stray pieces of gravel. The house itself was less than impressive. Over-large and sprawling in a way that didn’t quite make sense: the microcosm of a poorly planned city expansion. There was something ramshackle about the place, a hint of decomposing wealth, weather stains and overgrown foliage that suggested it had seen better times. Well. Hadn’t we all.

I made my way to the backyard where a swarm of police officers were hovering around the pool, snapping pictures and sharing droll remarks over paper cups filled with coffee. A well-built man in a uniform with sandy hair and bright eyes caught sight of me and made to stop my progress.

“Hey, no press allowed, man. Get outta here.”

I said, “ _I’m not with the press. You should get your superior officer. You should tell them to leave and keep this area clear for twenty minutes_.”

I said, “ _Don’t worry about me. I’m supposed to be here_.”

He looked at me blankly for several seconds, his features contorted into a mask of confusion. He said, “Yeah. Okay. Whatever you say, sir.”

It took about five minutes for everyone to leave. Perception and memory spells were useful, but they came with their own set of consequences. Something that simple shouldn’t be an issue, but then, nothing that was happening here was as it should be. I sighed and stepped up to the edge of the pool. The sun reflected in flashes of blinding light off the surface of the water.

And that’s how I came to be here, standing on a pool deck watching a corpse casually bob up and down in the chlorinated water. It really does look like the opening of _Sunset Boulevard_ , but in full colour and with magical ritual sacrifice. A slightly different genre, I’ll grant you, but there’s no reason the fantastic can’t interact with noir elements now and then, is there? After all, I wore a trench coat for the better part of a year.

I knelt down and touched the water. Ripples spread from my fingers as I felt for ambient mystical energy. I frowned. There was something here, something familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

On the rooftop behind me, a hooded figure clad all in black watched. They sucked their lower lip into their mouth and chewed on it until pieces of skin came away between their teeth and the metallic tang of blood coated their tongue.

I stood and flicked the water off my hand. There was something here that I couldn’t quite grasp, like a word stuck on the tip of your tongue that dissolved before you could speak. I tapped the hidden amulet at my throat and the Eye of Agamotto drifted up to my forehead, opening a third eye that revealed a world beyond the mundane.

The figure on the roof scuttled backwards, outside of my field of vision.

I gazed across the area, walking back and forth, searching for minute vibrations in the air currents and spectral manifestations. Against a wall of the house there was a series of freshy inscribed—and hastily erased—glyphes. The ghosts of the runes remained, faded shadows set into the pale stucco wall. I placed my palm against them and could feel their power: a burning that tore through my skin and made the veins in my hand pulse. Whatever dark energy the sacrifice was meant to bring forth, its malice still crackled in the wall.

A shiver crawled up my spine. This magic was twisted and hauntingly familiar. I scrolled through a list in my mind of old enemies, trying to account for a myriad of names and their corresponding locations. I glanced back at the body. The spell had been interrupted, but the corpse might still yield some pertinent information, especially if I could ascertain how the victim had been killed. I moved back toward the pool.

With my back turned, the figure on the roof materialized behind me, silent as nightfall. I could smell the acrid odour of rotting souls. A barrier spell halfway out of my mouth, I turned, and was smashed in the chest with something cold and black. The impact sent me sprawling into the pool; I gasped and choked on a mouthful of water. I tried to swallow. Pain seared through my lungs.

It took a moment for the shock to dissipate, for me to calm my mind enough to convince myself I wasn’t drowning and command my cloak to help lift me out of the pool. Above the lukewarm water, I coughed until my chest ached and my throat was raw. I scanned the area rapidly between heaving breaths, looking for my attacker, but whoever they were, they were long gone. And they’d taken the body with them.

I set myself down on the bright stone patio, every piece of material on my body dripping into a growing puddle at my feet. I ran a hand through my sopping wet hair and said, “Shit.”


	3. summon up the blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shout out to my wonderful friend and advisor in all matters of life and writing, the fantastic [aclockworklove](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AClockworkLove/pseuds/AClockworkLove), for helping me out with this chapter.

“Tony Stark called while you were in LA. He wanted to know if you’d found anything.”

I was floating cross-legged in the middle of my library. There were volumes open in the air around me, but it had been several minutes since I’d adsorbed any of the words on their pages. Whatever spell the killer had hit me with hurt like hell. The cold felt like it was still seeping into my skin, trickling through my arteries and freezing the blood.

“Doctor.”

It was making my head pound. I raised my hands to my temples and dug my fingers into my scalp. They shook against my hairline.

“ _Stephen_.”

I glanced up. “Yes, Wong?”

He frowned and gave me a look like he was biting back a lecture. He said, “I’ve been trying to get your attention for some time. Tony Stark called to see how you’re making out with the case.”

I grunted. There wasn’t much more to add, really. California had confirmed that magic was involved, but had yielded few answers aside from that. I dropped my hands from my head and started examining the purplish bruises on my chest. They were grouped in a rough approximation of a circle, but oddly shaped, like a bundle of small whips. There were dark coloured scabs in a few of the deeper bruises from where the spell had torn my skin.

I sighed and looked back at Wong. “You know it took me ten minutes to wash all the blood out of my chest hair?”

Wong stared at me, his features totally impassive. He had the most remarkable way of exuding complete and utter irritation without actually using any facial muscles. I liked to think I had a particular gift for unnerving people with the correct application of silence and subtle eyebrow gestures, but my skills were nothing compared to Wong. He said, “I’ll go see about lunch,” and left the room.

I nodded at his back and landed with an indecorous thump on the floor.

The thing no one ever mentions about levitation is this: without the aid of an artifact like my cloak, it requires an inordinate amount of core strength. Sure, magic plays its part, but spell casting isn’t all long alliterative phrases and fancy hand-gestures. As with most expressions of power in this world, there’s a cost to be paid, whether those around you notice it or not. Generally speaking, the more powerful the magic, the higher cost.

I picked the books out of the air and set them down on a desk in the corner. I was tempted to contact Wanda again, to see if she had any other ideas, but she had her own issues to deal with and there was no sense invading her privacy for something I should, by all rights, be able to figure out on my own. I sighed and pressed my hands into the the table and bent my head. There was an ache crawling up my back into my neck. I needed to figure out where the killer planned to strike next, and I needed to find out what in Hoggoth’s name they’d hit me with. The pain in my head had turned from slow, dull drumbeats to sharp lines like knife blades searing through my skull. When I looked out the window, flashes of white popped in front of my eyes. It was overcast, and on the street below a sullen figure in a black hoodie sagged against a wall, slowly sliding into a shadow. In their hands were unopened envelopes.

I closed my eyes and dug my palms into my sockets. Explosions of red and yellow and other less distinct colours blasted through my vision.

To my back, Wong said, “Stephen.”

Damn he was quiet. I kept my eyes shut but lowered my hands to my sides. “What?”

“Stephen.”

I turned to face him, jaw clenched against a rebuke, and said, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa...?” My question trailed off into thick, inarticulate silence and I felt my entire face go slack.

Wong stood in the doorway, looking like he’d come to tell me he’d just killed my cat. I didn’t have a cat, but I assumed the reason was the woman standing behind him: my wife. _Ex-_ wife.

Clea looked...she looked...like she always did. Radiant and beautiful and formidable. Her hair was longer than when I’d seen her last. It fell in delicate curls around her shoulders, framing her face like a whisps of glittering cloud, ethereal and wonderfully bright in the dimness of my house. I swallowed loudly and said, “Hi.” My voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a very deep well and the pulse jumping in my carotid artery felt vaguely tachycardic.

She frowned at me and said, “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“I—what?”

Wong quietly withdrew from the room, either trying to give us privacy or retreating from whatever hell he thought was about to be unleashed in my study. Clea walked toward me and stopped close enough I could feel the heat radiating off of her skin, smell the scent of burning embers and dessert flowers and sundrenched sand. She was inspecting my face and I was thinking about bonfires on warm summer evenings, burning hot and bright against a field of stars.

She said, “They look bloodshot. What happened to you?”

I said, “Hm?”

She let out a long huff of air and said, “Your eyes, Stephen. Your eyes are red, like they’ve been bleeding.” She frowned at me, suddenly suspicious. “What have you done?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes. I could feel a torrent of words get stuck in my throat and turn to ash on my tongue. I said nothing.

She brushed past me and strode to the table, examining the piles of books while I stood completely still, worried if I moved or breathed too hard I’d wake to find I’d been dreaming. She ran a finger over the spines of each volume. Her nails were painted violet. She always did look rather magnificent in purple.

Finally, I unlocked my jaw long enough to ground out, “How are you?”

“I take it then this attempt to breach through dimensions wasn’t you?” She whirled to face me, arms crossed, and said, “If this isn’t you, then why haven’t you tried to stop it? You’re Sorcerer Supreme of this dimension. It’s your responsibility.”

What I meant to do was say, _I’m sorry you travelled all the way here for this. I’ve been working on it. Maybe you could help me? I might have a useful lead._

What I actually did was snap, “It’s lovely to see you as well, Clea.”

“Stephen, if you are not the cause, then someone else is trying to tear a hole into your dimension—and into mine. Do you really think now is the time to be trading barbs?”

In hindsight, I probably should have kept my mouth shut.

I didn’t.

The pain in my head was smashing staccato beats against my skull and into my eyes. I said, “Well, I haven’t exactly had a plethora of opportunities, have I? ‘Hello, Stephen. I’d like a divorce.’ And then what? You just disappeared? Where have you _been_? Why, in the name of the Vishanti, can we not just talk about this?”

“You didn’t seem to want to talk.”

“I didn’t seem to—I was a little shocked.”

“Really?”

“ _Yes!_ ”

My breathing was erratic. Air was being ripped out of my lungs in time with the pulsing agony in my head and it was getting increasingly difficult to tell what was battle damage and what was emotional devastation. Whatever had been there before, whatever fear and sorrow and hopelessness, now was a tight band of rage encircling my ribs, crushing my bones and heart and spine.

She stepped back into my space and jabbed a finger into the bruise on my chest. “How,” jab, “many,” jab, “affairs,” jab, “have,” jab, “you,” jab, “had?”

“That’s what this is about? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through since you left? You, Clea. And not for the first time! I don’t recall getting a vote when you decided your rebellion was more important than our marriage—than me!”

Quietly, she said, “And what about what I have been through? Do you think it was easy, living all those years in exile? Do you think it was easy, leading rebellion after rebellion against my own blood? Doing what you taught me to do, putting my responsibilities ahead of myself and the people around me? Or do you think you’re the only person who suffers when you shut yourself away for days and weeks at a time, when you prioritize, again and again and again, your job ahead of those you claim to love?”

“My job is protecting the universe. If I don’t do what I must, we all die.”

“You cannot hide behind your title forever, Stephen Strange. You made your choice, you must live with the consequences. Or are you really so arrogant you can’t find fault in your actions?”

“What, the affairs? We had an _arrangement_. And it’s not like you haven’t—”

“Are you sure this is wise?”

“— _with Ben Franklin!_ ”

Clea’s face was glacial, her voice colder still. She said, “That was decades ago and it meant nothing. Do you really think I don’t know you had feelings for those other women? Your nurse? The mother in Nebraska?”

“She was never _my_ nurse,” I spat.

“You can delude yourself as much as you want, think me petty and ignorant if you wish, but none of that can expunge the guilt you’re so desperate to annul. You say you wish to talk? Why, then, did you never come after me? Never once seek to find the cause of my actions? Too wrapped up, as always, in your own ego, determined to find fault only if it lays external to you.

“Tell me, Stephen, on whom do you blame your choice to murder a world?”

“I did what I had to do.”

“Does repeating that help you to sleep better?”

I said, “No.” I hadn’t realized she’d known about that. But of course, she must have. Must have known about it all; her initial assumption was that _I_ had been using the magic circle, that I’d deemed it appropriate to slaughter twenty-two people for a blood sacrifice. And I could hardly fault her logic. I closed my eyes, and felt every last vestige of emotion drain out of me. I said, “No, it doesn’t.”

I felt hollow inside, like someone had carved everything I was out and left behind only a vague, shimmering anger. How long had I been like that and never even noticed?

She’d been watching, all this time. Alone and embattled and in all kinds of peril, but she knew what I did. I had no idea what had occurred in her life. It was as she said; I’d been too wrapped up in my own issues to spare a thought for anyone else. Arrogance, pride, distance. It was always the same. I never learned.

She turned and examined the rest of the objects on my desk. She said, “This is a map of the sacrifices? Have you determined where the next one will occur?”

I looked at the floor and my eyes drifted in and out of focus, still burning with the pain radiating from my head in sharp, bright lines.

The worst part isn’t that she’s right about me; she always has known me better than I’ve known myself. I tell myself what I did what necessary, what I’ve become is what the world requires of me, but I can feel the lie hiding behind those words. I wear them like a suit of armor without ever stopping to think that it’s only dragging me under the surface faster. Even if I can justify it somehow, the consequences of those actions are incalculable. I can still feel it sitting in the back of my mind, the lust for power. The need for it, pure and acute, like any other addiction.

But that isn’t the worst part. No, the worst part is realizing how much I hurt her. I think I must always have known, on some level. Perhaps that’s why it was so much easier to bury myself in arcane arts and casual encounters than to try to fix our relationship.

I said, “Clea.”

She didn’t respond. The edges of my vision were starting to close in and the walls looked like they were changing colour. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss trepanation when I was in medical school. Drilling a hole in my head actually seemed at the moment like it might not be wholly without merit.

“Clea, please.”

I looked across to where she was standing, head bowed over her reading, the same posture I’d had not long ago. The room was small, but the space between us felt vast and empty. Her figure was dark and wraith-like, silhouetted against the grey light streaming in the window.

I said, “Clea, I’m not the one doing this. And I’m not possessed. I’m just an asshole.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “Have you tried looking at the...what do you call them in this dimension...the lay lines?”

“Yes. But there are several possible places the next sacrifice could occur.”

The room was getting steadily darker and the walls were peeling.

I said, “I was going to try scrying.”

Under the skin of the walls was something fleshy and dripping with blood. It looked like smooth muscle. My head felt like it was imploding.

The room was in black and white. A figure, small and hunched and monochromatic was sitting on the floor with me, shuffling through pieces of mail. Every few envelopes they paused to open one then place the contents back inside and seal it closed. Sometimes they found money and stuffed it in their pockets. Their eyes were pits of pure black and there was blood dripping from their lips. It was the only other colour left: red and black and white and grey.

Somewhere far away a voice said, “Stephen.”

They were holding an envelope in their hands that was cracked with age. The corners were furrowed and it was singing something thin and sinister.

The voice, louder now, said, “Stephen, open your eyes.”

I did. I was lying on the floor, looking into Clea’s face. Her hand felt warm on my forehead and I shivered. I said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “Try to sit up,” so I did.

She said, “You were unconscious.” 

I said, “Yeah, I gathered. I saw...I don’t know what I saw.”

My head still felt like a nuclear testing range. Clea was sitting next to me, one hand on my shoulder, the other at her side. My skin burned where she touched me.

She frowned at me, then frowned at my chest. “What is this from?”

“A spell. I think. I had a run-in with our murderer. They hit me with something before I got a chance to see who they were. They got the corpse, too.”

She said, “That’s sloppy of you.”

I said, “Yes, thank you.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when I move. Or talk. Or breath.”

“A simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed.”

“Sorry.”

“So you keep saying.”

“Clea, I—”

“Perhaps now is not the best time,” she said. “We should discover what did that to you. It may have given you a connection to the killer.”

I said, “We don’t have time. Dimensions are in peril, remember? A scrying map is faster.”

“You’re being careless. Again. What happens when they surprise you a second time? You don’t really expect them to keep running and leaving you alive, do you?”

Well. That was a decidedly bleak outlook. Then again, given that I was sitting on the floor, too dizzy to try to stand or make any quick motions, I supposed she wasn’t wrong. I said, “Maybe this time I won’t have to go after them alone?”

Clea rolled her eyes at me and said, “Let’s try to get you off the ground before we make any plans.”


	4. into the breach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long. i had a hell of a hard time writing this chapter for some reason and it ended up taking ages to get right. hopefully it'll be worth the wait. special thanks again to my wonderful friend and beta [aclockworklove](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AClockworkLove/pseuds/AClockworkLove).
> 
> also, please note there is some pretty objectionable language (including slurs) in this chapter and the violence/horror rating is mostly for this section.

The sun setting over the water made everything gleam in swaths of violent orange. Bright like neon, it reflected off darkened window panes and the jagged edges of dirty metal beams. The smell of fish guts and unwashed humanity filled the air, stinging my nostrils, making my eyes water. In the blue shadow of a squat grey building—a factory or forge or storage shed long left abandoned—a group of destitute wretches huddled close to the corrugated metal wall, bound with magic and scurrying away from the light like rats escaping flame.

Their leader was monochromatic, a slight frame drowning in a black hoodie that looked like a hand-me-down from a much older, healthier sibling. He wore black jeans tied onto his hips by a fraying white shoelace desperate to give up and black shoes with holes separating the canvas from the rubber soles. The skin on his face was faded and waxy, his eyes sunk deep into his orbital sockets. He had black hair and chapped lips and looked like a skull left to bleach in the sun, picked clean by vultures and other scavengers.

“I have the power of a god!” he shrieked, spit streaked pink with blood flung from his mouth, the rancid odour of rotting souls wafting toward me.

He struggled against the magic Clea had used to tie him, jagged, jutting motions that stuttered like a spider or a fly, like actions played from a reel of film with frames cut out. In med school, in an ER rotation, I’d seen junkies thrash in a similar way, watched accident victims attached to IV poles stumble down hallways with the same jarring, injured movements.

Sometimes, the nerve damage in my hands causes them jump. They twitch at my sides, swing in small erratic arcs while I curl my fingers into tight fists and watch my knuckles blanche, wait for the shuddering to stop. That kind of involuntary response feels like how this kid looks, sudden jerks and lurches, off balance, graceless. Uncontrollable.

He threw himself against his crimson binds and fell forward onto the loose gravel, still spewing saliva and screaming he was birthing a god, he was the herald of a new age, he was going to save everyone save everyone _save everyone!_

I sighed and crouched next to him, my boots crunching and spitting up small stones. His screeches echoed off the empty buildings and rocks plinked softly against each other.

“I’m trying to help you,” I said. “This magic, you can’t control it. It’s destroying you. This type of possession never ends well.”

He wrenched himself backwards. His eyes were so dark, I couldn’t tell if they were merely shadowed or if the irises and whites had been swallowed by whatever was inside him. “It doesn’t matter! What happens to me doesn’t matter! I’m bringing a god to save us all! No one will help us, but I can save us! I can save us all!”

Wilting beside the building, his small band of followers mumbled, “Save us, Charon. Save us.”

I grabbed his shoulder and placed my other hand on his forehead and said, “I’m going to help you.”

He said, “This is necessary!”

They said, “Save us.”

I began—I’m sorry, this is horrible narration, isn’t it? I completely skipped over how we got here, and for that matter where here is. I must apologize. I seem to have gotten a little ahead of myself. Uh, but I suppose, for posterity, I should step back a bit and return us to my study.

\----

Clea did, eventually, agree to the use of a scrying map. Blobs of crimson stained the creased roadmap, dripping from my forearm with the laziness of a faucet left barely open. They hit the paper with a rhythmical pat, pat, pat.

“That’s probably enough,” she said.

I nodded and whispered a quiet spell and watched my flesh knit itself back together leaving barely a trace of injury. I prodded at my chest, trying to decide if it was worth expending the effort to heal that, too. It was tender, but didn’t seem to require any immediate attention; circumstances demanded, as they had before, that I conserve as much magical energy as I could, anticipating a later fight. I left it alone and looked over Clea’s shoulder at the map. Her hair sparkled in the grey light and fell down her back in tresses of gossamer. If I reached out to touch it, I’d find it soft and silken and oddly cool on the numbed skin of my hands. Like icicles made of down fluttering over nerves wrapped in gauze and neoprene. I flexed my fingers against the air and scar tissue pulled against my knuckles.

Clea tapped the map. I flicked my eyes down to where she was pointing. The largest collection of blood was drowning the city of Chicago in a lake of red.

I said, “Well, at least it’s on this coast. Last time I had to teleport to California.”

She said, “Stephen,” and sucked her lower lip into her mouth.

I smiled lightly and said, “Let me just get my cloak.”

“Are you sure you should be doing this? It won’t do to have you passing out amidst a horde of enemies.”

I frowned. “And a shirt and shoes probably wouldn’t go amiss, either.”

“Stephen are you listening to me?”

“Of course I am, my love,” I cringed at my own slip. “I’m fine.”

The steep angle of her eyebrows suggested she didn’t entirely believe me. She was right not to: I was far from fine, but there wasn’t time to argue about the tactical merits of entering combat with a headache. Certainly not if Clea’s claim—that this magic circle was going to tear through my dimension as well as hers—was correct. I felt fairly certain it was, and even if not, the circle was almost complete, and the other alternatives for its use were no better. We needed to leave, and we needed to leave now. We could worry about my health later.

She crossed her arms over her chest, but didn’t protest. Maybe we could worry about our relationship later, too.

\----

Powerful magic has a way of making itself felt. It resonates, moves outwards in waves that hit you with an inexplicable intensity. People who complain about their skin crawling or getting a sudden shiver are often reacting to a nearby spell. The trick isn’t necessarily in being able to detect it, it’s in understanding what it means; different types of magic transmit themselves in different ways, creating a complex network of delicate shifts, latticeworks of hidden worlds and vague impressions. This magic, the magic being channelled into this circle, is about as far from subtle as the arcane can be.

The moment we arrived in Chicago, it began pulsing behind my eyes, beating in time to the thrumming of my headache. A dark feeling, laced with violent energy and bloodlust. It made the hairs at the nape of my neck and on the backs of my hands stand on end.

The closer we got to its source, the faster it beat against my skull, until by the time we hit an abandoned warehouse district on the water it felt like someone hopped up on amphetamines was was playing a snare drum behind my left eye. Cold was seeping back into the bruise on my chest. I decided to land and walk the rest of the distance. Clea set down behind me.

She walked up to me and I could hear the concern in her footsteps. I said, “I’m fine.”

She raised an eyebrow and continued moving toward a small knot of people. From a distance, they barely looked alive. They stood facing away from us, their postures defeated, a mirror of the abandoned buildings surrounding them. The sun was low, casting sharp shadows. We were walking into a graveyard of crumbling factories, a mausoleum of sloping foreclosures housing a band of derelicts, all lit up in the hard, high contrast lighting of a film noir. My boots crunched loudly on the loose gravel. In front of the group, a small figure all in black held a knife that was alight in the glowing orange of the setting sun.

The leader spotted us as Clea finished whispering for the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak. The magic streaked through the air, crackling with energy and leaving a smell like an electric storm behind. It wrapped around the crowd, pulled tight enough to incapacitate them all. It was no small feat, being able to wrap up that many people. I turned to say so and caught the beginning of shout twisting Clea’s features, felt a sting of pain whip through my shoulder.

I twisted sideways, yelling for a Bolt of Bedevilment that shot straight at my attacker, then cracked into a building. The cursed man could teleport.

He skipped in and out of my vision, a vibrating smudge of black, too fast moving to hit. I raised a Shield of the Seraphim. The cold in my chest started radiating up through the wound in my shoulder and my eyes kept losing focus. I ground my teeth together, felt my jaw tense and my nostrils flair.

The man paused between disappearances. He tried to direct another of his attacks at me, a mass of undulating black tentacles that glistened with reflected sunlight. My shield held and Clea fired another binding spell at him. He fell to his knees, screaming. Visions of a colourless mailroom flashed in front of me. He scrambled to his feat.

“You have no idea what you’re doing!” he shrieked. “I’m trying to help them!” His voice cracked over the words, broke oddly, like a needle scratching out of the grooves a record.

I shook my head and walked toward him and he kept screaming. The crowd yelled the name Charon at him, and it occurred to me he was more a boy than a man, barely over twenty, young and malnourished and scraggly. Just by his ears, where his face met his hairline, it looked like the skin was tearing loose, like a rubber mask that was wearing away, ripped from violence and overuse. In his eyes there was a dark crimson glow that had nothing at all to do with the sun and his hands were dripping with blood.

I said, “You already killed your sacrifice.” It wasn’t a question.

He said, “I had to. I needed the power. The power to bring forth a god.” He jerked his shoulders toward the huddled mass behind him. “Look at them. Look! They need me. I can save them!”

I believe I’ve covered what happened next. I expected something to resist when I laid my hand on the boy’s forehead and started muttering an exorcism spell, but I had vastly underestimated exactly what type of forces I was dealing with.

Clea paced behind me like a predator, her footfalls light and quiet, her movements smooth and wary. I could feel the anxiety rolling off her. Pain flared in my shoulder and it felt like spikes were being driven through my temples. I closed my eyes and continued my incantation. The sweat dripping down my forehead tasted like salt and the words of my spell felt heavy, felt leaden, like they were tied to cinder blocks and drowning in my throat. I coughed and Charon screamed and I opened my eyes to look at him.

He was huddled in a corner, his arms wrapped around his legs and his whole body tucked into itself, making itself as small as possible, hiding. In his hands was a worn piece of paper, a thick stock that hummed faintly, a thin sinister tune. It looked like it had been torn from a book. On the floor at his feet was an open envelop. The sun was gone, turned into a single fluorescent bulb that cast a pale, sickly light on the colourless mailroom. I crouched in front of him and he said, “What do you want?”

“To help you,” I said.

He clutched the piece of paper tighter, his knuckles going white. There was a bruise on his cheek that was turning green, turning yellow, slowly fading away. He said, “What do I have to do?”

“Put down the paper,” I said.

“But I can’t read it,” he said, “it’s not in any language I’ve ever seen.”

I frowned and looked behind me; there was no one there. Charon’s gaze was vacant, fixed on a point over my shoulder. Whatever he could see that I couldn’t was slowly seeping the warmth from the room.

He nodded, and started to read. I recognized the words and I screamed for him to stop.

I was on my knees and my throat was raw and I could taste blood. The sky was on fire, all reds and oranges and above that deep, uncaring blues. My hands were shaking. The boy in front of me groaned and beside me Clea said, “Stephen?”

I coughed. “I’m fine.”

“Maybe I should—”

“I said I’m fine,” I snapped. I knew what had taken Charon, what was living inside him, festering, trying to free itself. And I knew how to stop it. “Come on, kid,” I said, grabbing him and preparing to start the exorcism spell again. To Clea I said, “Be ready.”

I could hear the frown in her voice as she said, “For what?”

“For things to go very, very badly.”

The moment I touched his head, flashes of bright white started to pop in front of my eyes. I ground the words of the spell out between clenched teeth.

_Pop._ The kid was alone in an alley, starving, clinging to the torn piece of paper, a ragged page from the Darkhold. He was waiting for someone.

_Pop._ Chicago. The abandoned warehouses. Me straining to rip the words out of my throat, my chest tight with the weight of something ice cold and pounding.

_Pop._ A man, large, tall, violent. The kid cowering. The man yelling, “Get the fuck out of my house, Teague!” Voice thick with a Boston accent, some neighbourhood I couldn’t place. “Get the fuck out you fucking fag!” The man raining punches down on the kid’s head to punctuate each word, a battery of Morse code.

_Pop._ Chicago.

_Pop._ Teague, alone, a voice in his head whispering, _You’ll need a new name. Something befitting the servant of a god._

_Pop._ A crowd of people, hopeless and alone. Teague above them, brandishing his stolen page of the Darkhold, promising protection.

_Pop._ Chicago, everything sideways. Clea’s voice. Someone screaming.

_Pop._ A dark room filled with the scent of blood. A body on the floor in a scarlet circle. Teague in the corner, crying.

_Pop._ Me, lying on the ground, the world sideways. It took me a moment to put the two together, to realize that the world wasn’t off-kilter, I was. It took several more seconds to realize that the screaming I could hear was my own. My head felt like it was collapsing in on itself, like a dying star being crushed under the weight of its own gravity, and small explosions were still popping in and out of my field of vision.

The boy, Charon, Teague, was moaning, tears leaving clean streaks down his dirtied face. “I had to,” he said, over and over, like a prayer. “I had to I had to I had to I had to.”

I tried to sit up, but the ground opened up beneath me, and I was falling through nothingness. I landed on pavement with a sickening crack and a voice whispering in my ear, _You didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you, Strange?_

I could taste sour whiskey on my breath and I wanted to roll my eyes and mutter, _Not this shit again_ , but even when you know something is fucking with your mind, it’s not always that easy to ignore what your senses are telling you. And mine were screaming that I was drunk on cheap booze, nearly passed out next to a puddle of my own vomit. It wasn’t the first time I’d been dragged back into this memory, and I supposed it was overly optimistic to assume it would be the last. It did get tiresome, though, being constantly reminded of periods in your life you’d prefer to forget.

I scrambled to my knees then my feet, stood swaying in the shadow of a broken down bar while the proprietor yelled through the closed door about stinking vagrants and drunken homeless fucks. It reeked like urine and my head was agony.

“Chthon,” I said. “Enough with the parlour tricks. I’m bored.”

I could feel the demon laughing as the scene dissolved, leaving me back in Chicago. _Ah, I see you finally recognized that page from my book, Doctor_ , it whispered. _I must admit, I was worried you would have figured this out sooner. You must be slipping._

Clea was next to me, her hands grasping my shoulders, thin fingers digging through my shirt into my skin. My vision kept skipping, things around me peeling like a sunburn and underneath the sloughed off surface I could see smooth tissue wrapped in brittle, leaking veins, could feel myself slipping on a floor of folded intestines. It was wrong, all of it; intestines petrified when touched and veins didn’t grow in those shapes, clutching and strangling and choking. I could still feel Clea’s hands on my shoulders and I wondered why it was the anatomy that troubled me, more than the vision itself.

In my mind, Chthon laughed. The sound was too loud, ringing in time to the pulses in my chest, the pain in my skull. _The boy was starting to fall apart. You’ll do a much better job of finishing what he started, won’t you?_

I said, “Yes.”

_Good. Start by killing him. He is no longer needed._

I said, “Yes,” and jerked free of the hands that held me. They came back, grasping and clutching, pale skeletal things, like tree branches in winter. I pushed them away with a simple spell and turned to the boy. He was still lying on the ground, weeping. My lips curled. Pathetic. It was a mercy he didn’t deserve, the spell I used to end him. So quick and painless. I could have made it last for hours. But I could feel my master growing impatient. He wanted it done now, and then the rest of the child’s useless band could follow.

The hands came back again, clawing at me, tugging and grabbing, relentless, something in them screaming for me to stop, screaming, “Stephen!”

Someone nearby was whimpering, someone else pleading, and my fists were wreathed in flames that sputtered out, spitting and hissing as they dissipated. “That Flames of the Faltine? When did I—?”

“You need to get out of here,” Clea said. She was pale and shaking. “Now.”

The sun had almost set, leaving the sky a scar of brilliant red below an onslaught of darkness. I blinked, trying to make sense of Clea’s demand and the corpse at my feet and the group of people, freed from Clea’s magic but still huddled together, blank faces frozen in masks of fear.

It all clicked together in one slow, terrible moment. A second that somehow seemed to stretch into minutes, into years, and I could see Teague’s face, slack and lifeless, lined up next to the faces of all the patients I’d ever lost on the table, the friends I’d tried and failed to help, the people I’d killed, the worlds I’d ended.

“Go,” I said. “Get them out of here.”

On the tip of my tongue, a parade of excuses and equivocations and justifications and the hollow words, _There was nothing I could do_ , handed out with cardboard sympathy and a release of liability waiver.

Clea said, “Stephen—”

And I said, “This isn’t done.”

Chthon was scratching at the back of my mind, chipping into it me, the world slowly starting to peel away again.

I said, “Please,” and tried to find some place of calm where the demon couldn’t touch me. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled through mantras and prayers and chants, stopping each one as soon as I started, the feeling of rage growing stronger, a violence I couldn’t suppress seeping into all the empty spaces inside me, all the pockets of grief and self-doubt and shame and failure and filling them up, flowing through the cracks of loneliness and wrapping around what was left of my missing soul and gorging itself on the shredded wreckage of my heart. I began naming the bones in the human feet, whispering their names under my breath, phalanges and metatarsals and cuneiforms, and then Clea screamed and the world exploded.

My eyes snapped open and I saw Teague’s denizens throwing themselves at her. They were attacking with a desperation and inhuman strength that could only have been born of Chthon’s influence. I knew I needed to stay back. I knew I needed to keep myself calm and let Clea protect herself.

I knew that, but the thin streak of logic left to me was evaporating quickly and I could feel Chthon’s laughter nagging at me again. Goading me. I yelled for Clea—a panicked warning, barely even words—and wondered why I’d bothered. There was nothing on this earth worth salvaging, only sacrifices to be made so my master could finally be freed of his prison and return in his true splendour.

The woman shaped thing stilled the crowd that was attacking her and turned toward me and I smiled. She had power that would be entertaining to test. She split herself into a dozen copies, surrounding me. I laughed along with my master and we said, “ _The Images of Ikonn won’t save you_.”

She said, “No, but it will distract you.”

I saw a bright flash in the corner of my eye and I raised a shield to block it, laughing. Then something struck me in the back and everything went black.

\----

The place where I found myself was dark and empty, a flat landscape that disappeared into a bloody red horizon. It was a cave without a roof, a sewer without walls. The ground was pitted with craters and in the distance the silhouettes of crumbling ruins jutted into the dim sky, a row of sharpened teeth in the mouth of an abyss. That’s what this place felt like: a void, a nothingness, an end. I wondered if somehow I’d been dragged into a secret corner of Hell or trapped in the nowhere between dimensions. I wondered if I’d finally died, for good this time. It occurred to me that might not be such a bad thing.

My memories were faded, warped in an odd way. I pictured a scan of my brain thrown against a wall, black splotches like burns in rubber scattered across the film and a doctor in a white coat shaking his head. I closed my eyes and opened them, trying to fill the holes, but all I could find were images that seemed to tumble out of order when I tried to hold on to them, that were bright and over-sharpened one moment then blurry and distorted the next.

If this was the afterlife, it certainly left something to be desired. Not to sound too enamoured of myself, but I had expected that when I was killed, Death would have the decency to show up in person. We’d duelled enough times that it seemed like the courteous thing to do.

I followed my thoughts around in a circle, chasing a single question:  _what did I know?_ The answer was not much. I decided to try a spell and silently asked the Vishanti to give me flame. Fire appeared dancing in the palm of my hand until I curled my fingers into a fist. My magic still worked, at least.

_Oh, Strange. Do you really not know where you are? Can’t you even hazard a guess?_

I turned to face the voice and found a tall, emaciated figure standing behind me. It was humanoid, or at least it was a biped, but there was something not quite right about it. It staggered toward me, it’s movements jumpy and skittish, like a fly. Like the boy’s, Teague’s, had been. He was dead. I had killed him.

I looked up at the thing as it shambled closer. It’s limbs were too long for its torso, and pallid, almost translucent, reflecting the crimson light. It wore traces of clothing, ripped and soiled and barely clinging to the skeletal frame of the thing and behind a mask its eyes glowed sickly white. Blood was dripping down the sides of its mask, and as it got closer, I realized what it wore was the flesh of a human face pulled tight across sharp features. It smiled, and the face tore almost in half, sharp pointed teeth, elongated and needle-like, gleaming. The face had belonged to Teague.

I wanted to turn, to run, to find somewhere safe to hide and puke. Instead I said, “Chthon.”

_Do you like the face I took?_ The jaw of the face swung back and forth as the demon spoke, dangling by thin threads of skin. _Since you killed the boy, I didn’t think he’d need it._

I took a deep breath of warm, stale air and forced my features to remain neutral, my voice to stay level. “You know where we are?”

It cocked its head to the side. _So odd that you do not. Can’t you recognize your own handiwork? You built this place, Strange._

I frowned and gazed out at the blasted land stretching far away toward an angry sun like a red giant at the end of its life, trying to determine what the ruins could have to do with me. The collapsed structures were ancient, the broken bones of once proud monuments, the decay of a colossal wreck. There was a familiar pang to the thought, a sensation like deja vu, comforting and alienating all at once.

Chthon’s laughter echoed in my mind. How could we both be trapped here? It had possessed Teague, and then it had possessed me...of course. The answer was so simple.

“An ectoplasmic plane,” I said. I glanced at the soot gathered near my shoe. “I admit, I had rather hoped my soulscape might have a little more life to it.”

_There’s not much of it left._

“Yes, I can see that.”

_Curious that you can’t feel it._

“And what makes you think that?”

_Come now, Doctor. Enough with your games. Lie to yourself all you want. You can spend the rest of eternity here doing just that. But it’s time for me to leave. Get out of my way._

“No.”

Behind its stolen face, the demon looked utterly baffled by my declaration. _What did you say?_

“No.”

_You can’t possibly hope to defeat me, Strange. The boy sacrificed enough to give me back more than ample power to deal with the likes of you._

I shrugged. “Then you’ll kill me. You won’t be the first,” I stood up straight. “You might be the last. But you’re not leaving here while I still live.”

_Fool!_ it hissed. _You don’t know what you’re dealing with._

“I’ve consumed demons before, Chthon,” I said softly. “I am the protector of this dimension. I do what is necessary.”

It lashed out to attack, withered arms flailing and crackling with magical energy, and I stepped to the side and whispered a few quiet words from The Scrolls of Damnation, a spell for the destruction of an astral form that I’d only used once before. Just like Daniel Drumm, the aspect of Chthon was annihilated, eviscerated in a flash of blinding light and a shriek of unimaginable pain. I closed my eyes and sat on the ashen ground. In the distance, a ruined pillar of stones collapsed with a deep rumble and a puff of darkened dust.


	5. autopsy

I could hear voices muttering to one another in hushed, funereal tones. Their cadence had that same bereaved rhythm, the soft rise and fall of platitudes and worn cliches, well-meaning sentiments wrapped in the skin of trite aphorisms. They drifted in and out of my mind, quiet phrases like, _must have felt as if there was no other way_ and _we’ll know soon_ and _should be okay in time_. Trailing those was the faint notion that it shouldn’t be so hard to reason if the voices were speaking about me or Teague or his followers. I tried to make myself care, but the thoughts became fuzzy and slowly melted away.

Later, after minutes or hours or days had slid by in darkness, I opened my eyes to find myself staring at my bedroom ceiling. I blinked at it a few times and it remained inanimate, which I took to be a positive sign. I made to get up and realized I was bound and gagged. I was in my bed, which was nice, but I was still wearing clothes, so I could only assume that the measures had been precautionary: a response to my most recent possession.

Wanda’s face appeared suddenly, very close to my own, and she frowned into my eyes. I raised my eyebrows at her, thinking this was going to be a very limited conversation indeed if I was restricted to facial ticks and pupil contractions. She flicked her hand, and the gag disappeared.

She said, “Stephen?”

I said, “This is an unexpectedly intimate situation.” My throat was dry and strained, my voice rasping and horse; it felt like I had been screaming for an eternity.

She huffed loudly and leaned away and said, “I can put that thing back, you know.”

I smiled faintly and my gaze fluttered back to the ceiling. It was a pale colour, something in the taupe family with a name like eggshell or porcelaine. The type of off-white that was designed to be artistically unobtrusive, to blend into the background and let other, more garish colours draw attention. “What happened to Teague’s followers?” I asked.

“They’re fine,” Wanda said. “There was no lasting damage done to any of them.”

“No lasting _spell_ damage, perhaps. There are many kinds of damage. Some more permanent and intractable than others.” At my sides, my hands curled into tight fists, fingernails digging into flesh.

“You didn’t harm any of them.”

“I didn’t help any of them, either.”

“You couldn’t have—”

“Couldn’t have what?” I snapped. “Couldn’t have noticed what going on sooner? Couldn’t have stepped in earlier and prevented this? Of course I could have! That is precisely what I am supposed to do—protect people from magic, even if it comes from themselves.”

Wanda looked down and I knew she’d heard more than I’d intended to say.

I coughed and my throat burned and I could taste blood. “Could you release me, please?” Wanda turned her head toward the door, and I followed her sightline, noticing for the first time that Clea and Wong were standing there, both of them tense, ready to attack. I sighed loudly. “I’m not possessed.”

Clea’s face was set, her mouth drawn in a tight line, her frown etched deep into her pale skin. Standing like that, she could easily have been made of stone, an ageless sculpture of numinous beauty, all grace and elegance and indomitable stubbornness. Wong’s wary stance seemed almost relaxed next to her. In the stillness of the room, everyone watching me and me staring petulantly up at the ceiling, I noticed that my head had stopped hurting. Where lines of pain had arced across my skull, now there was an odd kind of emptiness, a vacancy that felt stuffed with cotton swabs.

I debated the merits of arguing for my freedom, but ultimately decided I was too tired to be eloquent and complaining was likely to be as successful as anything else. I said, “I’m losing circulation to my periphery.”

Wanda, her arms still crossed, said, “Have you ever considered speaking like a normal person?”

I said, “Yes, but I didn’t feel that would adequately convey my level of irritation at this continued situation, or how easily I could free myself from it with the proper application of knowledge and training, both of which I happen to have.” Actually, I wasn’t that convinced I could free myself at all, let alone with ease, but I saw no reason to admit that. I also didn’t see any reason to explain that speaking in what I had been told was a “haughty, grating matter” tended to be my default way of communicating irritation. It was an involuntary response—as much a distancing mechanism as anything else—that I usually tried to repress. But, well, I wasn’t having a very good day, and the alternative was telling everyone in the room to kindly go and fuck themselves.

I still hadn’t ruled that option out.

In the shadow of the doorframe Clea nodded, a quick, curt gesture, and Wanda released her spell. I dragged myself into a sitting position and rubbed my wrists, perhaps a little more dramatically than was actually warranted. Wanada gave me one last look then turned and walked out of the room, Wong following closely after her. The door clicked closed behind them. Clea remained where she was, her face still an inscrutable mask. I tried to think of something witty to say but failed spectacularly. Instead I smoothed down the edges of my eyebrows with my fingertips, hoping Clea would eventually break the silence but thinking it might be best if neither of us said anything at all. In the distance between my bed and door, in the heavy absence of words surrounding us, I could see the ghosts of our intertwined past. Funny, how memory could haunt in a way that no spectral phantom could.

The floor creaked softly as Clea crossed the room. I fought down the smile pulling at the corners of my lips, the sad, yearning expression knitting in my eyebrows. I could hide myself so well from people, I sometimes forgot how easily Clea pierced all my deflections and affectations and rendered my defenses obsolete. I shifted on the bed and dropped my gaze to watch the blanket twist over itself. The mattress sagged when she sat on the edge of it and my shoulders tensed, waiting for a blow to fall.

There was so much to say, so much filling up the spaces between us, but anymore I didn’t have the energy. Fights with Clea were like vivisections. We cut each other to pieces, into slender ribbons of pain, the flayed and bloodied remains of who we were and who we tried to be cleaved and sliced until we could examine the chunks and find them wanting. Arguments became autopsies that threw the corpse of our relationship on a cold slab and systematically dissected it, laying bare all our faults and failings and hidden things. It was gruelling and I was exhausted.

I let out a long breath of air and started to say her name and she reached across and laid her hand on mine. Her skin was pale next to mine, almost the colour of the scars that wound up my fingers and past my wrists, and where my hands were calloused hers were soft, warm where mine felt cold. I ducked my head and looked up at her through my eyelashes and bedraggled hair. I wanted to grab her and hold her against me, to breath in her scent and feel her heartbeat, wanted to press my face against her hair just so I could know, absolutely, that in spite of all the demons and dangers and near misses, she was real and I was, too. But I was afraid to move and dispel the illusion, to find myself back in Chicago fighting Chthon or here in my home, alone, cataloguing our shared history like personal effects left ownerless in a morgue.

I’d told them I wasn’t possessed, but the truth was somewhat less assured.

Clea said, “Your eyes look better than before. Clearer.”

I nodded, and we stayed like that for a long time, her hand over mine, her fingers tracing a landscape of ridges and spines, the veins and bones and screws that sat under my skin like a ruined geography of broken down cairns. My mind drifted back to Chthon and our brief duel, to the barren remains of my soulscape, decimated by decades of dark spells and blood magic and demonic possessions. It had bothered me for years that a large part of my soul was missing; I’d tried again and again to account for it without success. I supposed it could have been chipped away slowly over time, was sure that some of it had, but that hardly seemed an adequate accounting for the pervasiveness of the damage. Eventually, I would have to find an answer. I could only keep going on as I had for so long, before the consequences caught up with me. Everything had a price, every action a reaction, and magic was no different. And what would happen then? Would I be able to repel another attack by the likes of Chthon—or even the fallen god itself? I was not so naive to think it was defeated; Teague had been consumed by a page from the Darkhold sent afloat in the miasma of the postal service. How many other pages like that were out there, defying possibility by their very existence?

“Why are you frowning?” Clea asked. She’d laced her fingers through mine. Her eyes were bright, deep blue with flecks of purple and traces of silver, and they were searching mine for something.

I said, “I missed you.”

“You’re frowning because you missed me?”

I grinned at that, a small half smile, almost a smirk. “No,” I said. “I was thinking about the boy.” The one I’d killed. The one I should have helped, but murdered instead. Clea inclined her head, the ghost of a nod, and shifted herself across the bed until our shoulders were touching. I said, “He didn’t deserve that fate,” and I could hear the pleading notes pulling on my voice. “He wasn’t evil or cruel. He wasn’t a monster, not until the world made him one.”

Clea withdrew her hand from mine and wound her arms around my waist. I swallowed a knot of self-effacing words and useless vitriol and rested my cheek against the top of her head. I couldn’t do anything for Teague, but I could keep fighting, keep trying to stop it from happening again. That would have to be enough. I let my eyes drift closed and Clea’s hair tickled my nose. I felt like one of us should say something, break the comfortable quiet with a poignant declaration, but neither of us did. I supposed this, whatever it was, would have to be enough, too.

  


 

_end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that’s all. thanks to everyone who read this, and especially to those delightful people who took the time to leave a review or kudo. i can’t tell you how wonderful and encouraging that is!
> 
> i had originally planned this as a stand-alone, but since i’ve already been asked twice about a sequel, and since this fic seems to have been surprising well-received, i am maybe, possibly, considering a follow-up piece. i don’t want to promise anything, but i have a few ideas, which may or may not end up going someone.
> 
> thanks again for sticking with me through this whole mess. ❤


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